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to rule out any atypical element or idiosyncrasy in social action. Our job is to
understand whether a particular type of behaviour is typical in the society or is
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highly personal. Our interest is not in the individual, but in understanding The
collective behaviour of the community. That is why the same type of behaviour
must be observed over a length of time to discover the common features that exist
in all its instances. This is called the method of ‘concrete, statistical
documentation’ of human action.
2) The early travellers, who came from the western world, to the areas of the-so-
called ‘primitive’ people laid their eyes upon the study of the oddities, strange
customs, and manners, which their cultures did not have. They were mainly
interested in identifying the differences between these people and the westerners.
Thus, it was obvious that they did not pay any attention to the everyday life of the
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people. Incomparison to this approach of ‘selective study’, it was argued that we
should study the everyday life of people, the things which are generally taken for
granted. Our job is to study the entire society, the relationship between its
different parts and the way they all function together. Therefore, the need is to
know the whole, rather than some of its parts, which excite interest among the
visitors. The advice is to study each and every aspect of the society rather than
those which appear peculiar and strange.
3) Malinowski says that the ethnographer lives in the village, or the site of his study,
with ‘no other business but to follow native life’, to observe it as closely as
possible, the ‘customs, ceremonies and transactions over and over again’. There
are several phenomena that cannot be recorded by questioning them but have to
be observed as they take place. For example, Malinowski includes in this list the
‘routine of a man’s working day, the details of the care of his body, of the manner
of taking food and preparing it, the tone of conversational and social life around
the village fires’. These occurrences, which Malinowski calls the ‘imponderabilia of
social life’, need to be observed, their subtleness need to be meticulously recorded.
4) We should note down the exact words in which people communicate their
thoughts, ideas and beliefs. These ‘ethnographic statements, characteristic
narratives, typical utterances, items of folklore, and magical formulae’ should be
recorded as a whole. The collection of these constitutes what Malinowski calls a
‘corpus inscriptionism’, which guides us to the understanding of the ‘mentality’ of
people. Each word needs to be culturally understood and analysed. Language is
the mirror of culture.
5) The objective of an anthropological investigation, Malinowski says, is to “grasp
thenative’s point of view, his relation to life, to realize his vision of his world”.
Each culture has its own set of values, the ways of doing things, and it gives a
distinct meaning to the lives of people; in other words, the hold of each culture on
the lives of its people is different. If we look at this as an outsider – from an
outsider’s perspective we shall never be able to understand it, for our values would
come into play, and we would end up providing a biased and prejudiced view.

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